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Empire Records fanfiction! I guess this can be read as a comparison between Deb's relationship with AJ and her one with Berko. Or it could be read more strictly just as an AJ-Deb pairing. That might require implying too much subtext though. Anyway, it's up to the reader.

This is pre-movie, but then I realized that I had Deb's hair shaved. Oh well. I like her better that way than with hair.


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During a break (she takes too many of them on slow days), Deb smokes a cigarette without really inhaling, kicking her feet up on the backroom table. Corey is working on her math homework and the scratch of her pencil sounds like some European trash music. A headache pulls tight around her eyes.

She has her earphones around her neck, humming softly, and once Corey starts talking about romances and friendships and boundaries and expectations Deb wishes she had put them on. Blocked out the whining girl-voice.

“God, Corey.” Deb runs her palm over her head, the bristle of her hair sharp against her palm. “You’re the only one who still wants bullshit romance with three-dollar carnations. Why don’t you just wear a sign saying Lie to Me?”

AJ is gluing more art to the tables. He looks up and catches Debra’s eyes. He’s the only one that laughs, short and soft and amused.

By the time Berko walks in, guitar slung over his shoulder, the conversation hasn’t changed much. Corey has refilled everyone’s coffee, Deb keeps idly twisting the rings on her fingers, and Berko dislikes the way he watches AJ watching her.


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“Doesn’t it bother you?”

AJ pulls his shirt on, quick and smooth, his hair hanging in his eyes. His body is taller and less pierced than hers. He is still charmingly uncomfortable with his nakedness at times. Deb almost likes it until he opens his mouth, spewing forth naivety.

Pressing her foot into his chest, she scoffs. “It’s just sex, AJ, not a contract for your soul.”

Fumbling with his jeans and then his belt he shrugs, almost sheepish. He sits on the edge of her couch, and she stretches languidly before adjusting the green straps of her bra. Her skin is a little hot and blotted red. AJ’s mouth is sore. He touches it with his fingers and looks around her room, a small rundown studio with records stacked on the floor and a mural of broken glass on the far wall. There’s scattered Bazooka Joe wrappers, broken guitar strings, picks, and a man’s thick silver jewelry. He doesn’t ask whom they belong to, because he already knows.

Leaving, AJ tries to press a kiss to her cheek and she shoves him away, annoyed, all hardened and unyielding.


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Berko takes her to a drive-in outside of town. Nowheresville isn’t much; they pass industrial buildings colored in graffiti and there isn’t a lot grass. They don’t speak while he drives, and the music is too loud, but she feels comfortable. Or as close to comfortable as she ever does. Deb presses her forehead to the glass window and likes the dirt on the streets, the empty gray colors of the world around her.

At the drive-in, she drinks syrupy soda and doesn’t eat the popcorn Berko buys them. She doesn’t beckon him to the backseat either but three-fourths into the movie she leans against his shoulder. They sit like that, his fingers on her knee, their shoulders touching. She doesn’t smell like much but her eyes are a weird bright-dark, hooded, and her voice makes him think of burned sugar. (He tried to write about that once in a song, but the lyrics didn’t match the heavy guitar solo and the panicked sound of the drums.)

Halfway through the ending credits, Deb lets him kiss her lips though they’re slack over clenched teeth.

She is angry and combative most of the time. It probably correlates back to her runaway mother. Berko doesn’t pry but he still gets pushed away, still always ends up fighting against her for any little thing.


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They park by a cemetery and have sex in the back seat of his car. It’s only the second time they’ve done this. Berko would have preferred his threadbare bed and the warmth of his old blankets, but Deb is hurried, savage, all hard edges, and then later she cries. Her tears scald and dry quickly.

When he sees her the next day at the record store, she says hello without glancing up and then puts on her headphones.

She doesn’t talk to him for a week.


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Deb goes up onto the store’s roof. She does it to be alone from time to time, and she still thinks that’s a little ironic – really, she is normally tired of feeling alone. More solitude isn’t going to help. But the air is fresh and she can get away from trading insults with Gina and avoid Joe’s increasingly worried glances.

AJ finds her. He rubs the back of his neck. “What’s up with you and Berko?”

“What’s up with you and Corey? Jealous much.”

Taking a seat beside her, he shrugs. He’s always doing that, she realizes, talking with his body and his fingers. Saying more with his eyes but trying to communicate just as well with his mouth. “I just, you know, think you deserve to be happy.”

Deb rolls her eyes. It’s almost a tradition now – AJ speaks, and then she scoffs. “Yeah, well, thanks.” She smiles fixedly down at her hands, a rictus nothing like her real smile.